#writingtech

While some choices in dialogue will come down to style preference, most fanfic dialogue suffers from a much earlier problem of being done incorrectly, no matter what the stylistic preference. Once basic spelling & grammar is mastered, and assuming the fic contains more than a handful of dialogue, I think bad dialogue is the thing that kills my enjoyment the fastest. I can handwave plotholes and understand emotions that weren’t conveyed right, but I can’t read people having a conversation that doesn’t look anything like an actual human conversation.

Problem 1: Too Much Drama

We want our scenes to pulse with energy! Of course we want the dialogue to be dramatic! The problem here is, what makes for good dramatic dialogue is not people yelling powerful words at each other very passionately. What makes for dramatic dialogue is mostly the importance of that scene to the plot & the characters, so to achieve dramatic dialogue, the best thing you can do is not overly rely on the dialogue itself to be dramatic. Set up a dramatic situation, and then people don’t have to yell. They can say a few basic sentences and the audience already knows why it is important and why the characters care so much.

Have you ever seen the scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau yells “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” Did you actually find that dramatic or did it just make you laugh because it was overdramatized? That’s what dramatic dialogue does to a story. Unless your characters are middle schoolers exclaiming it out in the hall between classes, chances are, older and more mature characters aren’t going to do a lot of yelling or make weirdly dramatic statements like the world is ending.

One of the biggest offenses on this count is overusing exclamation points and overusing emphasis. Exclamation points should be used very, very rarely, as should telling your reader what words are meant to be emphasized. Your character’s mood should primarily come through action - are they slamming doors, pacing back and forth, collapsing into a chair? Dialogue tags like “shouted” or “replied angrily” can be used to help, but should not stand on their own as the only thing portraying mood.

Instead of looking like this: “OMG! Can you believe it! Drama! Let me scream all the drama out in a monologue!” Lisa screamed, it should look like *Lisa kicks off her shoes, one leaves a mark on the wall* *Lisa slams bag down on counter, opens fridge for beer* *Lisa’s boyfriend stands frozen, as this is not normally how Lisa comes home from work. “This thing happened.” *Lisa collapses into kitchen chair and sticks head in her hands.* *Lisa’s boyfriend comes to put a hand on her back*. “One sentence reminding reader why Lisa is upset about this”.

Problem 2: Too Little Drama

Alternatively, you get scenes that sometimes look like two college roommates got high and are trying to acquire a pizza with as little effort as possible. Let’s say, for example, you have one character that has a crush on another character, and they are trying to find out information about them. While maybe the character learning this information is going to do something with it, so it’s important to the plot in another way, so the conversation itself does not need to be dramatic, it might end up looking like this:

I met Crush after class and we walked together. “What’s your favorite color?” - “Red” - “Do you like dogs?” - “Yes. Did you do the homework?” - “Yes. Math is my favorite class. How about you?” - “P.E.”

Like with the above, setup and action are everything. If you set up the scene where we know in advance how long it has taken Karen to get up the courage to talk to Chad and things like that, and then include actions in between the dialogue to show that she is nervous and therefore not very talkative, like her glancing up at him briefly but looking away as soon as he makes eye contact, or have her analyze Chad’s mood and wonder if he’s annoyed, etc, the scene can be made much more meaningful without needing to be a “dramatic” scene.

Problem 3: Dialogue is written like exposition

This tends to go unnoticed by some authors who are otherwise decent, and for me really ruins an otherwise decent story. The writing within the dialogue tags is written well, it just isn’t written like dialogue. It is written like exposition/narration.

In exposition: This project was doomed from the beginning. The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns was going to stop it before it really started. Sounds...not excellent, I just pulled an example out of my ass, but fine.

In dialogue: “I think this project is doomed already,” Bob said, looking around the meeting room. “The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns is going to stop it before it really starts.”

...sounds like Bob is kind of a psycho, or possibly your most pompous and hated coworker. Who the hell says “Law of Diminishing Returns” out loud if they aren’t a professor? The longer the dialogue and more flowery/technical/big vocab it becomes, which often *adds* to exposition, the worse and more unnatural the dialogue becomes.

Dialogue should not feel the same as the “speech” when a character is thinking. We tend to be fairly limited in how we express ourselves, use shorter and more simple sentence structures, more basic vocabulary, and haven’t memorized what we are going to say, so it doesn’t come out eloquently.

The one real exception to this that isn’t really dialogue, but is speech, is if you have a character making a speech or presentation, which they have prepared for in advance, and it is reasonable for them to give it uninterrupted.

If you want to make a point of one of your characters sounding like a total tool when they speak, you can also do this to achieve that and make it immediately clear to the audience why everyone hates them, but unless that’s what you’re going for, avoid this at all costs.

Problem 4: Dialogue is otherwise unnatural

Always, always, until you’re pretty damn sure you’re pretty damn good at it, say your dialogue out loud.

Would that personally really say “What is that?” or is it “What’s that?” Along the lines of not needing to use emphasis as much as you might think, if you were, say, in Scotland and just saw the Loch Ness monster pop out and want to ask your companion what it is, “What is that?” is fairly unnecessary. “What is that?” suffices. The simple fact that you didn’t use the standard contraction means the character emphasized the “is”. If you just see a piece of mail on someone’s desk that you are curious about, you’re going to say “What’s that?” and it won’t sound like you are dramatically asking about a generic piece of mail.

There are lots of very minor and small things that can easily go wrong in dialogue of this nature. It’s really important to say to yourself: if I was in this situation, how would I say it? Read it like you are acting it out in a movie and see. Also, question if a person would even say a sentence like that to begin with, or if they would be more or less direct in their approach. More direct is appropriate in many cases because people are usually trying to communicate clearly. Even if they are lying, they usually just say a direct statement that is a lie, they don’t dance around it indirectly and give hints to the other character. More indirect is appropriate when a character is trying to have a difficult conversation - we don’t tend to give tough advice or be directly rude, we try to work around it to make it sound better.

Because people want to have “exciting” or “cool” dialogue, they will often also give characters great rebuttals all the time, where they have these snappy conversations. This *can* work, but it’s really hard to pull off well, so in general I’d limit it to having a character having the occasional good rebuttal than a conversation of back-and-forth snark. Honestly, most of us just can’t think on our feet that well, and unless you’ve built the case that these characters can [ie, they’ve been married 20 years and are having the same arguments over and over so have it all thought out] it just seems very unrealistic.

Problem 5: Underutilizing dialogue tags

If you have two characters speaking, theoretically, if we know who the first speaker is and they switch off, a reader can follow the conversation indefinitely and know who is speaking.

In practice, that doesn’t happen. We like to be occasionally reminded. Personally, I try to max out at four consecutive lines of untagged speech, so no more than:

“Hey” said Kyle when he saw Brad.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Partying, bro, what did you think?”

“Haha, true. Do you think Lindsey will be there?”

“Man, you have such a crush on her,” Brad laughed.

Problem 6: Overusing dialogue tags

Conversely, in a conversation that is easy to follow, every single line does not need to be followed by a variation of “X person said”. If you are going for a tight back and forth conversation where neither character is thinking in between, you want to gum it up as little as possible with extraneous non-conversation. Hit us with occasional dialogue tags, and that’s it.

Problem 7: Not breaking dialogue up

This is somewhat of a style question, but in general, conversations should only be quick back and forth when that’s the point, but otherwise should generally pause briefly to “show” people doing actions, give some character thoughts, or otherwise break it up so the entire scene isn’t just a conversation.

Also, you can use these pauses as a way of showing hesitation/actual pauses that happen in the conversation.

Problem 8: Huge breaks between dialogue

This is something I am probably the *most* guilty of myself, because I’m writing a story where characters analyze the other characters a lot, so sometimes they’ll pause and think for a while in between. I haven’t quite arrived at the level where I’ve figured out how to get that all to flow in a way that breaks the dialogue up nicely, but not so much it is jarring and you’ve forgotten what the last thing a character said was.

I learned desktop publishing on my Mac with a bootlegged copy of Aldus PageMaker 3. I’m now writing in version 5.0. In fact before I started on my Mac, I learned the basic concepts of desktop publishing at school on an Acorn Archimedes machine running Impression Style. I believe very few people outside of the UK would have heard about the Acorn system, which was rarely found outside of education. I was recruited into the Publicity Unit where I began to learn about editing and page layout, and seriously look into typography and graphic design. Camera-ready artwork was printed out on a 300-dpi laser printer, and placeholders were left for the printer to ‘strip in’ half-tone photographs.

With this version of Adobe Type Manager, PostScript Type 1 fonts could be installed onto the Mac but it does not display well on screen – specifically tuned screen fonts are needed for the type to look somewhat okay. And if you print to a non-PostScript printer, it would look exactly like it does on screen – very jagged. But if you have a LaserWriter, or output to an image-setter, the type would look as sharp as the resolution of the device.

Look, I by no means consider myself a particularly outstanding author. I’m not saying I always get this stuff right. I just over-analyze the shit out of everything, so I figure it can be a win-win for me to write down my own reminders of what can go wrong, and anyone else here that’s thinking about writing can see the type of things I think about when it comes to trying to write a fanfic that sounds like a respectable amateur approach to writing instead of the mistakes that people typically associate with fanfiction/make fun of fanfic for.

Anyway, me deciding to become an actual writer would be the biggest unexpected event of my life, and given that I one time woke up to being dragged out of bed at multiple-semiauto-point because my normal suburban family was mistakenly believed by the police as being high up in a drug cartel and responsible for a huge distribution network, that’s saying something. My thoughts are just collected ramblings of someone who attacks things at full strength at all times, even if I may never write again, they are not a substitute for actual editorial advice.

This will be made into separate posts by topic. Some will be more focused on true technical parts of writing that have right/wrong answers, others will be more on the subject of stylistic concerns, but to start off with, I’m not going to make a separate post for the easiest and most basic: grammar, usage, spelling, and all that good stuff.

There’s really nothing to explain, except to say you really need to care about getting it right. There’s no art to this, it’s all science, with the possible exception of some usage questions that aren’t strict grammatical Yes/No. As a non-native English speaker this is going to be harder, and I do think readers are willing to make some exceptions if they know that is the case, but the unfortunate truth is, no matter how well you do the rest, if a person can’t read your writing for what it is and has to be mentally correcting it, it’s going to be hard to appreciate the rest of the work you put in to the story.

Okay, while I don’t exactly include more subtext than the average author who is trying to do that, I think I include it differently than people are used to, at least in this fandom.

The subtext is more context than what happens next. My plot is not linear in the sense that I am not building a tower, block-by-block, to get you to the end way up high, and looking down at where you came from gives you an idea of the upwards trajectory. What happens next is often just...life moves on like normal. There’s nothing to gain by trying to predict how it will catapult up.

What you can do is predict how it ripples out, as long as you know that what you are trying to get a sense of is the structure of an entire house - where it’s built solidly, where it isn’t, and why touching here can make something happen over there. The tension in my story rests pretty much on the fact that if you move a few key pieces a little, the whole “this is normal life” structure can come down or change unrecognizably. It’s a far more demanding plot for a reader, which is why this story really is terrible in serial form, but I think it works the best for the plot points I need to achieve and one day you can read it like a book, so...one day.

I went through my most recent published chapter, which contains basically all the different plot elements I point at, and tried to give a sense of what I think a reader who invested a bunch of mental energy could pick up on as far as things that are meant to be meaningful to how the story ties together. I know, it’s a fanfic, not an English class assignment, which is why I invested the mental energy for you to show an example that hopefully makes it easier to approach other chapters without as much energy, but you can still have the enjoyment I think we get out of trying to piece the plot puzzle together, like when you’re reading a mystery novel, because you now can overturn a lot more pieces.

Uhh...anyway, I hope you’re bored, because it’s a 15,000 word chapter we’re analyzing.

With the return of Covid-19 yet again in Hong Kong, this weekend was spent entirely at home, retro-computing. I installed Mini vMac, a classic Macintosh emulator and installed the Macintosh II ROM with System 7.1, and downloaded a whole bunch of obsolete software that I used in the 1990s. A lot of fun.

I'm writing this blog post in Microsoft Word version 5.0, what I used to write on my first computer, an LC475 that my parents bought me in 1993, running System 7.1. I rummaged through my old CD-ROMs and found a folder titled ‘Old floppies’. I found, to my horror (delight?) my GCSE coursework in Word 5.0: ‘Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the theme of ambition in the play', ‘Napoleon: the ‘Animalist in Power’ (a response to Orwell’s Animal Farm, written and formatted like a newspaper article), ‘A political assassination', ‘The rime of the ancient mariner’ (an interview based on the story) and ‘To what extent do national newspapers reflect all shades of public opinion?'. I realised that I didn't really take up writing seriously as a ‘thing' until I started using a word processor (I did learn word processing on the command line BBC Micro though but didn't really take it seriously until I had my first Mac). Something about the fluidity of word processing that allowed me to explore ideas without committing them as tangible marks on paper. The freedom that everything I type is only but tentative was a key factor I reckon.

Typing now in this extremely low resolution Mac emulator is quite nostalgic, especially using this bitmapped version of Geneva 12, the default in the system text editor Teach Text. How I became productive in such a low tech digital environment back in the day is a bit hard to believe. It was also on this machine that I learned desktop publishing in PageMaker, and also PowerPoint (where I produced an ‘interactive' school prospectus) and other things like Photoshop (version 2.5) and Illustrator.

During University I moved onto WordPerfect 2.1, which I found to be a much more sophisticated word processing package than Word was at the time, even though it was already somewhat outdated. I also found a bunch of stuff I wrote back when I was studying for my undergrad degree and could open it natively on the emulator.

I sort of half-intentionally don’t make the text polished (hence the use of contractions like ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’), and leaving typos uncorrected. I tried not to go back to edit past posts, but have hopelessly failed. The typos still bother me.

As for publishing, every post is in effect ‘published’, but also evolving. But I have also been exploring other dimensions of publishing – fixing the text in a PDF, ‘designed’ (whatever that means), making it available for buying on lulu.com as a print-on-demand publication, and leaving the text published yet ‘open’ as a Google Doc – are some of the experiments so far. Representing the unedited, unpolished text with a ‘designed’ look was to raise the question of ‘when does a draft become a published “work”?’ Because sophisticated typesetting technology is now available to everyone, the boundary between a draft and a published work has dissolved. This might have something to do with the loss of the author’s ‘aura’, or their ultimate ‘death’. The RGB colours were intentional, playing upon material/non-material.

Let’s see what other ideas I’m going to toy around with.